After signing up, you’ll be prompted to pick a project template. This provides you with a task-specific template pre-filled with some data that helps to give you an idea of what the tool can do. There are templates for project management, hotel booking, vacation planning and more. The templates are useful, because Ganttic is a complex app that might be hard to pick up otherwise, particularly as the online documentation is fairly sparse, and some parts of the interface aren’t particularly intuitive.

Additional users can be added to the account (as administrators, limited users or viewers), so plans can be developed collaboratively; any changes made to the plan are instantly reflected on everyone else’s screen. There’s also a chat window, so users can communicate through the tool. I tested project collaboration by logging in as a couple of different users and found that it worked pretty well.

Although the Ganttic website says the company believes its product is the “best alternative to MS Project,” in reality, it’s nowhere near as powerful a project management tool as Project. Additionally, it’s really only suitable for planning projects, not tracking progress. It’s more than powerful enough to handle scheduling, however, which is all that many companies really need, and I like the way it’s collaborative, so it can be shared by an entire team.

Ganttic is a complex app, and parts of the interface do take a bit of figuring out, which may put off some users. If you need a basic planning app the whole team can pick up quickly, I’d recommend sticking with the more intuitive Tom’s Planner. But if you need more advanced project management and planning features, such as reports, Ganttic is worth a look.